So What Are You Good At?

Have you ever had the opportunity to feel you were really good at something? Not just a ‘Meh, I’m pretty good.’ kind of good. I mean a ‘Hey, if you put me out there with the best of them, I can hold my own!’ kind of good!

I’ve been there. I’ve felt that way.

I think most who know me would expect me to say that I felt that way about wrestling. While it’s true that by the end of my high school wrestling career I did not approach a known adversary with fear or intrepidation, I knew I had a limited skill set. I practiced with all intensity and pushed myself to that limit, but I understood that despite my best effort, there were people out there who were simply better than me. (To my credit, opportunities to face such challengers became a welcome occurrence!)

I feel (at least in retrospect) that I was truly good at Ultimate Frisbee. There wasn’t a throw I couldn’t make. There wasn’t an opponent I couldn’t guard. If a disc was in the air, I was going to get to it before you.

So what have you felt you were especially good at? A sport? Art? Cooking?

Now imagine taking a ten year break. Ten years without picking up a ball, handling a brush or stirring a boiling pot. How do you think you would fare the day you decided to pick it up again? Would your work someday hang in a museum, or would your cake fall flat and your buns burn? (You can take that last statement in reference to cooking or to your sport, whichever is appropriate.) Picking up where I left off is a task I attempted last Thursday.

I’ve done a little running here and there, but the maximum exercise my body has gotten in recent months (or years) is rapid finger movement across a set of labeled keys. Yet, despite my aged body, I mostly held up under the strains of running, diving and throwing. I’m not as fast as I once was and my legs often fail me when I attempt to launch myself after a disc, but everything worked, if in a diminished fashion.

The mental part was the toughest to accept. Every time I held the disc, my brain told my arm, “You can make that throw!” My arm would willingly accept my brain’s encouragement and with an agile flick of my wrist, send the disc sailing straight into the ground . . . or well over my target’s head . . . or nowhere near the vicinity of where I had hoped the disc would go.

For the first twenty minutes of the game, ‘hoped’ was an appropriately descriptive word. As the game progressed, it gradually turned to ‘anticipated,’ with wild misses being replaced by discs glancing off my target’s fingertips. I can remember a teammate cutting towards the corner of the end zone as I released the disc. I can see him dragging his toes along the boundary line, stretching his long arms to their fullest, only to have my throw tease his flesh before flittering away. A few short minutes later, I was again holding the disc in the same place with the same player making the same cut. In my mind, I knew the throw, a low, rising, outside backhand with a slight outside-in curve that would lead its target within inches of the line, all while avoiding the swat of the trailing defender. It was just like I’d made it a hundred times before. It was just like I had intended to do only minutes earlier. And as my teammate’s toes planted themselves back upon terra firma, disc in hand, my mind couldn’t help but chiming in. “That’s how I can make the throw!”

Now a few throws from an aging man have not reinstilled any illusions of grandeur that are quite obviously lurking within my mind. And while I did have fleeting visions of myself somehow competing at the national level, I am content with the mere opportunity to compete again. Now if only I didn’t hurt so much . . .